Over the last two decades, Pakistan’s energy demand has grown exponentially with very diminutive measures taken by the government to fulfill the needs. The large power plant projects are cumbersome, take years to be completed and require plenty of time to get fully operational. The idea of distributed generation works well in this case. Renewable energy comes well into play when we talk about distributed generation but the dependability of renewable energy resources on back-up such as batteries makes them unappealing. The objective of this paper is to practically implement a backup for the renewable energy resources using a mechanical storage such as CAES (Compressed Air Energy System). The proposed model is a composite technology, which comprises of EES (Electrical Energy Storage) and electrical power supply system. Solar energy driven compressor is used to compress the air in a storage tank, which is used on demand to drive the generator coupled air turbine. The fact that the developed system is solar powered, no other fuel is used with air and it uses mechanical storage instead of conventional storage like batteries, which makes the developed prototype system efficient, economical and durable as compared to the existing CAES. This paper focuses on the thermodynamic investigation, design and finally implementing a prototype CAES for a small load as an un-interrupted power supply system.
Problems of designing stand-alone power supply systems using renewable energy sources
